2019年经济学人 Facebook推出“天秤币”(4)（在线收听）

Hard currency

硬通货币

In a project with so many moving parts, much can go wrong. Although Facebook says it has a working prototype, the technology is untested; sceptics doubt that a 100-node system, let alone a bigger one, could process thousands of transactions per second. Hackers are doubtless champing at the bit.

在一个有这么多活动部件的项目中，可能会出现很多问题。尽管Facebook称其有一个工作原型，但该技术尚未经过测试；怀疑论者怀疑，一个拥有100个节点的系统，更不用说一个更大的系统，每秒能处理数千个事务。毫无疑问，黑客们正跃跃欲试。

Then there are consortium dynamics. Facebook will have to prove to the other 99 Libra members that it is truly prepared to give up control. At the same time, because important decisions need a two-thirds majority, someone has to knock heads together. The history of information technology is littered with initiatives that collapsed under the weight of internal conflict.

此外还有财团的活力。Facebook必须向其他99个天秤币合伙人证明，真的准备放弃控制权。与此同时，因为重要的决策需要三分之二的多数同意，所以必须有人集思广益。信息技术的历史上，不乏在内部冲突的重压下崩溃的计划。

The biggest barrier may be political. Facebook has apparently consulted many regulators. The providers of digital wallets will have to comply with national rules, such as those against money-laundering. Calibra, whose integration into Messenger and WhatsApp will initially make it the dominant wallet, is bound to stoke competition concerns. These may recede as the currency grows bigger and more decentralised, only to be replaced by worries about financial stability.

最大的障碍可能是政治。Facebook显然咨询了许多监管机构。数字钱包的提供者必须遵守国家规定，比如反洗钱规定。Calibra与Messenger和WhatsApp的整合，最初将使其成为占据主导地位的钱包，这势必会引发竞争担忧。随着天秤币的升值和更加分散化，这些担忧可能会消退，取而代之的是对金融稳定的担忧。

Libra’s success, then, is far from assured. But it could prove useful even if it flops, for it offers a blueprint for how Facebook itself could one day be governed. The Libra Association’s main task is to oversee the blockchain, ensuring, for instance, that Calibra does not enjoy privileged access to it. An equivalent Facebook Association, some observers have ventured, could be composed of representatives of users, advertisers, data-protection authorities and so on. Their job could be to oversee the “social graph”, another database, which lists all of Facebook’s users and the links between them—and to guarantee that Facebook users can post to another social network, and vice versa.

天秤座的成功还远未确定。但即使失败了，它也可能被证明是有用的，因为它为Facebook有朝一日如何自我管理提供了一幅蓝图。天秤币协会的主要任务是监督区块链，例如确保Calibra不享有访问天秤币的特权。一些观察人士大胆提出，一个类似的Facebook协会可能由用户、广告商、数据保护机构等方面的代表组成。他们的工作可能是监督“社交图”，另一个数据库，它列出了Facebook的所有用户和他们之间的链接，并确保Facebook用户可以发布到另一个社交网络，反之亦然。